Alexis Madrigal and BuzzFeed's Jonah Peretti discuss the copyright issues surrounding cute animal pictures: "Users of [other] sites surface photos that in some cases have been shared around the Internet for a decade. In those cases, even if BuzzFeed editors try to track down the creator, which Peretti assures me they do, they probably won't find whoever uploaded the photo of every obese cat." [The Atlantic]

I agree. Just because something is part of the culture in which you participate and to which you contribute, it doesn’t mean you have the right to continue to participate in that culture further. Lazy people should just make up their own culture instead of leeching off of culture created by others…

The Buzzfeed business model, with its dozens (hundreds?) of copycats, is to take content created by others and build massive social media interest in the Buzzfeed post—not the entry of the blogger, photographer, or journalist who created the original content. It’s not as much about copyright to me as it is simple respect. A site like this one (boingboing) almost always shows respect to content generators: boingboing usually only uses one photo and links back to the original content in a prominent way. I have had blog entries with 10-12 original photos and seen all 10-12 get lifted and used on Buzzfeed with a tiny link at the bottom, while the Buzzfeed post gets thousands of facebook “likes,” retweets, etc. I have written Buzzfeed when they do it and they almost always remove 8-9 of the pictures, but it seems the default is to take as much as they can and see what they can get away with.